“The danger? Well, of course. But you are missing a very important point. I think if any of us imagined – really imagined – what it would be like to go into a tree at 150 miles per hour we would probably never get into the cars at all, none of us. So it has always seemed to me that to do something very dangerous requires a certain absence of imagination.”
The words of a Grand Prix driver? Yes. Well, sort of. I cheated a little. It was actually said by Jean-Pierre Sarti, one of the protagonists in the 1966 John Frankenheimer film Grand Prix. A fictitious double world champion and senior F1 statesman driving for Ferrari. One that Frankenheimer said was based on a heady amalgam of Juan Manuel Fangio, Wolfgang von Trips and Jean Behra.
But clearly Sarti’s words apply to F1 reality, and still apply today. The latest evidence of this was in the Austrian Grand Prix weekend just passed. And I’m not even talking about, you know, that on the last lap. I’m talking about in qualifying and before.
F1’s Spielberg visits are known for giving us unusual outcomes occasionally as well as more often having that inimitable sense of being a place where things happen – which of course we got in spades this time. There are many factors contributing to this status, some tangible and some intangible. And this time there was another tangible thrown in. Very tangible it was too.
If the kerb is there, and you get on there and there’s a chance of breaking suspension, you keep off it. Full stop. – Johnny Herbert
Notorious yellow ‘baguette’ kerbs, sitting proud on the outside of many turns and good for breaking F1 cars. A few aero parts had been snapped off in Friday running and in addition Max Verstappen busted his front suspension on them. Not everyone had sympathy with him afterwards, but his complaints in retrospect gathered a bit more gravitas when there was another suspension failure for Nico Rosberg the following morning which was followed by two more failures within the qualifying hour, first for Sergio Perez then with spectacular consequences for Daniil Kvyat. Yet even so as far as many were concerned the route out of this was disarmingly simple. Stay off the kerbs, stupid.
This was outlined by Johnny Herbert on TV, reflecting the opinion of most it seemed. “If the kerb is there, and a kerb is something that is a little bit aggressive for you, and you get on there and there’s a chance of breaking suspension, yes you’ve got to push yourself to the very limit, but you keep off it. Full stop” he said.
“We saw with Dany Kvyat there was four wheels off and then he still went further onto the yellow [kerb] itself and that’s where you get a problem” Herbert went on. “If there’s a wall [there] you don’t hit the wall.
“These are the best drivers in the world with the best judgement in the world, they drive through the streets of Monaco with barriers and don’t clang into the barriers all the time…”
I don’t quote Herbert to pick on him given as intimated he was far from the only one espousing this sort of view. There was something like a consensus behind it. And at the broadest level it’s correct of course, while to take an extreme example I’m fairly sure that Alain Prost never went near a kerb in his entire F1 career.
Herbert’s view indeed was among the more generous particularly in his assessment of modern pilots. Some on social media and elsewhere went further and suggested that it all said something about the decadent modern driver not knowing they’re born, not compared with their predecessor generations anyway. This does appear these days a default conclusion of modern sportspeople. See the fallout from the England football team’s recent early exit from Euro 2016, quintessentially.
Even the more generous outlook of Herbert was in my view a touch simplistic. It all reckoned without F1 drivers as they are. And likely always have been.
But nevertheless even the more generous outlook of Herbert was in my view a touch simplistic. And not just because Jolyon Palmer pointed out that it wasn’t only the yellow kerbs more than a car’s width away from the track’s edge that were breaking the F1 cars, the closer and more ‘standard’ red and white ones had severe steps in them that were breaking cars too. Nor that Rosberg scarcely touched the kerb it seemed prior to his own failure. Most pointedly it all reckoned without F1 drivers as they are. And likely always have been.
What we saw from the pilots at the Red Bull Ring was in fact very different to what they were being accused of by some. Pretty much the opposite in fact.
For starters to nip one social media suggestion in the bud it wasn’t that F1 drivers tried and failed to avoid the kerbs. We had that confirmed almost immediately when in Q3 it rained and the kerbs, now slippery, had to be avoided for lap time’s (and not spinning’s) sake. All competitors managed to do this just fine. Monaco and its lining of barriers Herbert has mentioned too. There is no shortage of talent out there in other words.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff before qualifying instead got near the crux of the matter when he said that “if you want to qualify at the front you need to go over the kerbs". Quite – the drivers used the kerbs, even with there being such a known risk of hobbling their car on them or worse, purely because there was a lap time advantage from going over them – which of course is the racing driver’s ultimate aim – and they calculated that in that pursuit it was worth the risk. As Martin Brundle noted in his commentary of the wet and therefore suddenly kerb-avoiding Q3 mentioned, F1 drivers “look for the grip, they’re hard wired to do that”. He expanded on the whole matter later in his post-race online column: “The drivers’ response was largely ‘we can’t stay off the kerbs because others will use them and go faster’”.
The drivers’ response was largely ‘we can’t stay off the kerbs because others will use them and go faster'. – Martin Brundle
And thinking in the cold assessment that we saw four suspension failures in total in two days from 22 F1 cars doing however many scores of laps each, in that pure sense of balancing probabilities the drivers’ logic seems sound. Add to that, to my knowledge, not a single lap time in Austria was scrubbed due to the well-worn rap of ‘all four wheels crossing the white line’, and their decisions presumably were sealed. Anthony Davidson indeed summed up the conflict. “The racing driver in me empathises with the guys out there today”, he said during qualifying. “The pundit in me kind of says well if this was Monaco…”.
It’s been that way for decades too. Faced with a competitive situation, a chance to win, drivers’ instinct it seems takes over and they go for it absolutely, even when there is a conspicuous overhanging shadow of a safety risk. When visors go down any thoughts of reining it in are sent quickly to some mental recess. Among other instances we can think of Montjuic in 1975 when there were severe doubts about the fitting of the barriers; Dallas in 1984 when the track crumbled; Monza in 2001 when there was a fuss about something-or-other to do with two of the chicanes; Silverstone in 2013 when the tyres were going pop. On each occasion the air was thick of drivers resolving or even being pleaded with to proceed well within their limits in order to boost safety, in the first couple mentioned of them perhaps even boycotting altogether. Yeah, right. In the event – aside from a paltry handful walking out in Montjuic – they all went pedal to the metal just like nothing at all was amiss.
“Look at them” grinned an observing John Watson in the Dallas case, encapsulating matters as the drivers pelted around the track that so much had been said about. “Show them a green light, and they can’t help themselves”.
In the most recent of these, Silverstone in 2013, those who were watching that day will likely recall the sense of creeping foreboding as one tyre failure followed another. Very rarely indeed do I ever recall willing an F1 race to be stopped ahead of time as I did then, nor when the chequered flag fell the overriding emotion being relief that the sport, and more to the point its pilots, had got away with it somehow.
Look at them…show them a green light, and they can’t help themselves. – John Watson
After the first three tyre failures early in that race several drivers received radio messages advising them to keep clear of the kerbs in order to minimise the chances of a further tyre failure for themselves. But very little changed even so – still much kerb-riding could be seen throughout the field for the race’s remainder.
I recall sitting in the top three press conference afterwards, and asking the podium finishers what their thought process had been to discard apparently the safety instructions. The first two home, Nico Rosberg and Mark Webber, did try to suggest they’d sought to be careful (though as outlined it wasn’t clear what this additional care amounted to in practice). Yet the third-placed man, Fernando Alonso, probably with greater candour, made no bones about the fact that he simply didn’t heed the call for caution from his pit wall as he couldn’t afford to for the sake of his competitive prospects. “They kept telling me to go off the kerbs”, he said, “but obviously if you’re position 12 you need to attack, you need to change the racing line, you need the use the DRS…I didn’t change, I didn’t change lines.”
Max Mosley noted on another F1 film, 1: Life on the Limit, that for any driver given a choice between two cars, one two seconds a lap faster than the other but the faster one is less safe, it will for them be a no brainer. They will always choose the quicker one. F1 drivers therefore, he concluded, need coercion on safety matters. And it’s not as simple as a moral failure, it as Brundle touched upon also reflects human nature to an extent. Psychologists have various terms for such behaviour, such as the collective action problem as well as more specifically the prisoner’s dilemma. To put it in layman’s terms, and adapt it for our purposes, each individual driver will be afraid to be the one to make the initial move that promotes the greater good, as if others don’t follow their lead they will be at a disadvantage.
Perez indeed during Austrian qualifying after his own suspension failure and that of Kvyat, when asked for a solution immediately started to talk in such terms. “I think we have to put track limits or something [in place] if that’s the problem, because by [just] telling us [to stay off the kerbs] we won’t listen” he admitted. There was some exasperation at this, that as a friend suggested to me was akin to someone saying they’d only conclude they shouldn’t rob a bank if someone told them not to, but for the reasons given it likely is the only kind of solution.
Broadly as Brundle noted also during his Silverstone commentary three years ago, one is left half impressed and half disgusted by this. Yet also on some level Austria, just as Silverstone did, provided a latest reminder that driving in F1 is something that the vast majority of the rest of us couldn't do – which in itself is no bad thing, particularly given recent self-flagellating debates suggesting that observers would be forgiven these days for thinking they could hop in to drive an F1 car themselves almost uninitiated. Such an ‘absence of imagination’, prioritising speed and being able to somehow park the thought that their suspension could be the next to go – and if it did they could within a blink be a passenger on the way to hitting something hard – at some level surely elicits a sense of grudging admiration in most of us watching on. F1 drivers really are a peculiar breed. Therefore, all in, rather than F1 drivers being weak or sub-skilled in Austria, we in fact witnessed them at their most gladiatorial.
And last word goes to Sarti.
Jean-Pierre Sarti: “Before you leave I want to tell you something. Not about the others, but about myself. I used to go to pieces. I’d see an accident like that and be so weak inside that I wanted to quit – stop the car and walk away. I could hardly make myself go past it. But I’m older now. When I see something really horrible, I put my foot down. Hard! Because I know that everyone else is lifting his.”
Louise Frederickson: “What a terrible way to win.”
Jean-Pierre Sarti: “No, there is no terrible way to win. There is only winning.”
